He could just imagine what Astrid would do. Make it all about free speech or whatever. Or maybe not, maybe she’d see the threat, too, but Astrid was better with theories than she was with just walking up to people and telling them to stop.
In one corner of the plaza were the graves. The makeshift markers—wooden crosses, one inept attempt at a Star of David, a few just boards shoved upright into the dirt. Someone had knocked most of the headstones over and no one had yet had time to put them back.
Sam hated going there. Every kid buried in that ground—and there were many—was a personal failure. Someone he had not kept alive.
His feet stepped onto soft earth. He frowned. Why would there be dirt clods?
Sam raised his left hand over his head. A ball of light formed in his palm. It was a greenish light that darkened shadows. But he could see that the ground was disturbed. Dirt everywhere, not piled up, more like clods and shovels full had been thrown.
In the center, a hole. Sam brightened the light and held his hand over the hole. He peered down inside, ready to strike if something attacked. His heart was hammering in his chest.
Movement!
Sam leaped back and fired a beam of light down into the hole. The light made no sound, but the dirt hissed and popped as it melted into glass.
“No!” he cried.
He tripped, fell on his rear in the dirt, and already he knew he’d made a mistake. He’d seen something move, and when he fired the searing light he’d seen what it was.
He crawled back to the edge of the hole. He looked over the edge, illuminating the scene with one cautious hand.
The little girl looked up at him, terrified. Her hair was dirty. Her clothes were muddy. But she was alive. Not burned. Alive.
There was tape over her mouth. She was struggling to breathe. She had a doll clutched tight. Her blue eyes pleaded.
Sam lay flat, reached down, and took her outstretched hand.
He wasn’t strong enough to lift her cleanly up. He had to drag and haul, reposition, haul some more. And by the time she made it up out of the hole she was covered in dirt from head to toe. Sam was almost as dirty, and panting from the effort.
He pulled the tape from her face. It wasn’t easily done. Someone had wound it around and around. The little girl cried when he pulled the tape from her hair.
“Who are you?” Sam asked.
He noticed something strange. He raised the level of light. Someone had written in magic marker on the girl’s forehead.
The word was “Freak.”
Sam’s palm went dark. Slowly, careful not to scare her, he put his arm around the girl’s heaving shoulders.
“It will be okay,” he lied.
“They…they said…why…” She couldn’t finish. She collapsed against him, weeping onto his shirt.
“You’re Jill. Sorry, I didn’t recognize you at first.”
“Jill,” she said, and nodded and cried some more. “They don’t want me to sing.”
Job one, Sam told himself: take care of Zil. Enough. Whether Astrid and the council liked it or not, it was time to take care of Zil.
Or not.
Sam stared at the hole from which he’d pulled Jill, really seeing it for the first time. A hole in the ground where none should be. Something about it…something terribly wrong.
Sam gasped, sucked air sharply. A chill ran up his spine.
The horror here was not that a little girl had fallen into a hole. The horror was the hole itself.
FIVE
62 HOURS, 6 MINUTES
SAM TOOK JILL to Mary Terrafino at the day care. Then he found Edilio, woke him up, and walked him to the town plaza. To the hole in the ground.
Edilio stared at it.
“So the girl fell in, walking around in the night,” Edilio said. He rubbed sleep out of his eyes and shook his head vigorously.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “She didn’t make the hole. She just fell in.”
“So what made the hole?” Edilio asked.
“You tell me.”
Edilio peered more closely at the hole. From the first need, Edilio had taken on the grim duty of digging the graves. He knew each one, knew who was where.
“Madre de Dios,” Edilio whispered. He made the sign of the cross on his chest. His eyes were wide as he turned to Sam. “You know what this looks like, right?”
“What do you think it looks like?”
“It’s too deep for being so narrow. No way someone did this with a shovel. Man, this hole wasn’t dug down. It was dug up.”
Sam nodded. “Yeah.”
“You’re pretty calm,” Edilio said shakily.
“Not really,” Sam said. “It’s been a strange night. What…who…was buried here?”
“Brittney,” Edilio said.
“So we buried her when she was still alive?”
“You’re not thinking straight, man. It’s been more than a month. Nothing stays alive that’s in the dirt for that long.”
The two of them stood side by side, staring down into the hole. The too-narrow, too-deep hole.
“She had that thing on her,” Edilio said. “We couldn’t get it off her. We figured she’s dead, so what’s it matter, right?”
“That thing,” Sam said dully. “We never figured out what it was.”
“Sam, we both know what it was.”
Sam hung his head. “We have to keep this quiet, Edilio. If we put this out there, the whole town will go nuts. People have enough to deal with.”